Not Like Other Girls

Are romance readers...better than everyone?

The see-saw of popular media stereotyping romance novels (and its readers and/or writers) and the resulting backlash of defense from vocal romance readers and industry insiders is a ride I’d like to get off.

I’m not defending trash takes here…I have plenty to say about the stereotype about romance readers, having literally studied it. If you want the 15 minute redux, go here, or stick around for the tl;dr version right now:

• There is a measurable stereotype about romance readers: yes it exists

• …romance readers think it’s much worse than it actually is

Essentially: romance readers perceive the stereotype to be 100% negative, resulting in an emotional response of contempt toward them, when in fact the most common emotional response is pity, which is in line with a more ambivalent stereotype.

Stereotypes are category-based responses, which means that the individual reacts to another person as an interchangeable member of a social group. By their very nature, stereotypes are not TRUE, because they’re not about YOU.

And yet… given the stimuli of a stereotypical representation of romance readers —especially common mid-February, coinciding with a particular holiday that newsdesks are rabid to create timely hot-takes around—the urge to defend romance, or perhaps more accurately, to repair the injury to one’s own identity, seems hard to resist for many romance readers and writers.

Of course *I* don’t fit the stereotype of a romance reader!

23 years ago, Kim Pettigrew Brackett published research on “Facework Strategies Among Romance Readers.”

Brackett interviewed 12 participants to learn how romance readers employ “face-saving strategies in social situations,” in response to real or perceived criticism for reading romance.

She writes:

Perhaps because of their higher than average education level or having much to lose from a negative presentation of self, setting themselves apart from other readers seemed to be a priority for the women in this study. Each reader, in her own way, uttered the phrase, “I’m not like most romance readers.”

Riddle me this: how can it be that most romance readers claim they’re not like most romance readers?

What IS the typical romance reader? Who are they? Why are we so keen to believe that we are are individually an outlier, especially in a world shaped by larger systemic forces that are often invisible?

How can we all fall outside the bell curve, without creating a new bell curve?

Are we all Andy in her cerulean top, believing that she exists outside of fashion capitalism while suckling from its teat?

One has to consider that maybe, MAYBE the reason one doesn’t identify with the romance reader stereotype is because NOBODY is the flat stereotype that neatly packages demographic variables with personal characteristics, income, marital status, intelligence, and likelihood to buy a romance novel in the next 12 months.

Bad Romance Data

So today I was rereading that paper by Brackett, and also pondering my existence (LIKE ONE DOES) and also thinking about my next research project, which I definitely have to start because it turns out that when you write an abstract about an idea and then it gets accepted for something, that the next step is you actually have to do the research.

To be more specific: I proposed a topic to dig into all the data that RWA created for years about romance reader demographics and also the size of the market, for the 2023 IASPR conference in Birmingham, UK this summer. I proposed this mostly out of spite because my personal pet peeve is when people claim romance is a $2bn industry supporting all of publishing!!, and I happen to know there is no citation for this.

My title is “Bad Romance Data: Contextualizing the Popular Romance Fiction Market” - please clap for originality.

When I actually look at the demographic data RWA collected, and look at years of it alongside narratives about what’s shifting, and hypothetical reasons why, I can’t help but feel like they lost the plot - because none of it matters when it’s not contextualized in the wider world that romance, and romance readers, exist in.

One example: the education levels of romance readers is obsessively measured, primarily because the stereotype is that romance readers lack competence, i.e. intelligence. (This is truly the stereotype, by the way. I have GOOD data on this.)

So if hypothetically*, year after year, RWA data shows an increase in education levels among romance readers, that would seem to indicate that romance readers are super special geniuses (or at least have access to trust funds or good enough credit to take out student loans).

Except the data is absolutely garbage unless you compare it to the overall population. Without that comparison, how do we know that education levels aren’t tracking exactly alongside the general population? Or, at least tracking with the general book-buying/reading population? Or, what if it turns out that even if education levels go up among a representative sample of romance readers, that growth is actually slower than the average population?

Suddenly, we are the employee who realizes that our 5% “merit increase” isn’t even keeping up with inflation.

What if romance readers were just people?

What if we’re not different from other readers, other than the fact that we read romance novels? What if we’re all average romance readers because we’re average people?

What if romance is just like every other genre and has the exact same problems because it is impacted by the exact same systemic forces?

Is romance as a genre becoming more diverse or is it becoming diverse at almost exactly the same pace as works in other genres in publishing or other media? Is it EVEN becoming more diverse, when we aren’t able to accurately compare the current market or texts to those in historical points in time with any accuracy or at meaningful volumes?

Are the texts becoming less “problematic” at the same rate as other media? Are the texts portraying relationships in a way that is more progressive, or more conservative than the general population, or pretty much reflecting overall trends with relationships at large, and portraying the spectrum of relationships that fit the standard range at any given point in time?

Are romance readers stigmatized to a greater degree than any other type of leisure activity that is a niche specialization that people outside tend to not understand very well, and therefore make stereotypical assumptions about?

I have found studies about quilters managing stigma around having a stash of fabric, about people who pole dance as a sport managing stigma around that leisure activity (they insist it’s a sport, not just exercise, which is a likely story), and about fly fisherman managing stigma around their leisure activities.

If romance reading is stereotypically understood to be done by women, particularly wives, mothers, housewives, etc. (the data supports this), does the romance reader stereotype differ at all from the perception of that group or is it in fact tied exactly to beliefs around that group?

Is the stereotype really about romance or is it in fact just reflective of social structures that have absoLUTELY nothing to do with us?

…by the way, the data supports this too. In fact, the Stereotype Content Model (which was the theoretical framework for my research on stereotypes about romance readers) has proven the causal relationship between social structures and stereotypes.

Even if tomorrow the demographics of romance readers shifted dramatically, and in ways that were at odds with overall population trends, I’m not sure that the stereotype would change…at least not until social structures changed.

And on that note, good night. I have done what I set out to do here - send a first Substack post, and (hopefully) share some of my work-in-progress ideas, knowing that the nut is far from cracked.

I’d love to hear what you think! Please comment if you thought this was interesting, and please share all the bad takes about romance that will be published this week but as social scientists and not beleaguered test subjects!

*Truly, this is hypothetical and not me sharing specific data from this project.